Voila! An American Dream

CIII

Miami City Hall, the former Pan Am terminal building at Dinner Key, today

Dinner Key Terminal 
(Some silent / some raw footage)

  

The Commodore Flying Boat

St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest continuous European settlement in the United States, founded in 1565. Nevertheless, Florida lagged in its development as a colony for centuries thereafter, Despite having a strategically important location as a barrier protecting the Spanish Main from foreign incursion, the Spanish largely ignored Florida, except as a penal colony. Lucky men convicted of capital crimes (including religious apostasy) were offered the option of “Death or Florida,” which, despite its name, Pascua Florida “The Land of Easter Flowers,” was seen as a malarial cesspit populated by cannibalistic tribes of Native Americans. Hence, the few Spanish settlements in Florida were populated by criminals of all kinds, pirates, and Jews lucky enough to have avoided the autos-de-fe of the Inquisition (these categories sometimes overlapped). They were soon joined by escaped slaves fleeing south from the British colonies to find their freedom, variegated categories of freebooters, enterprising Bahamian settlers of every skin tone, and Indians trying to escape being hunted down and killed by white settlers, giving Florida a tiny but surprisingly mixed population. 

Spanish Florida. Note the riverine condition of South Florida as shown on this map

When the British assumed control of Florida in 1765, after the Seven Years’ War (most often referred to as the French and Indian War in North America), they imported both British troops and British settlers to Florida. They also divided the territory into two colonies, East Florida (the peninsula itself) and West Florida (the Panhandle). It is little known, but Florida was two British colonies in 1776 when the American Revolution broke out. Strongly Tory, neither Florida chose to send delegates to Philadelphia to join the Patriot cause --- and so there were thirteen and not fifteen colonies involved in the rebellion. 

Having lost its eastern seaboard colonial presence after having lost the war in 1785, Great Britain ceded underpopulated Florida back to the Spanish, who, again neglected it. The new United States of America became interested in Florida after buying the Louisiana Purchase from France. In all the 828,000 square miles of that virtually unexplored territory there was only one settlement of note. New Orleans lay right at the southern end of the mighty Mississippi River. Whoever controlled New Orleans controlled the river, and in some sense, the heart of North America. The U.S. offered to buy West Florida from Spain in 1803. Spain refused to sell. 

Buying West Florida became an important issue in early U.S. foreign affairs. The territory stretched from the Atlantic coast all the way west to the Pearl River (on the border of current-day Mississippi and Louisiana), just a few miles, and within easy military striking distance of New Orleans. New Orleans had been controlled by Spain from 1763-1801, and the United States feared Spain wanted it restored to Spain’s crown. Deeply troubled by the Spanish refusal to sell West Florida, the United States backed the establishment of an “independent” American puppet state in West Florida in 1810. The founders of the Republic of West Florida flew a dark blue flag with a single white star. It became known as “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and was a symbol of the Confederacy fifty years later. At the same time, American settlers from Georgia and the Carolinas began moving into the territory with their slaves and began the system of Plantation. When Spain finally relented and sold West Florida to the United States in 1819, the Spanish threw in East Florida as a bonus. Despite the Spanish attitude toward Florida as a worthless acquisition, American settlers found northern Florida congenial. But it was remote, and few people came south. By 1860, there were only 60,000 people in Florida.

 

The flag of the U.S.-backed Republic of West Florida in 1810. In 1861, "The Bonnie Blue Flag" became a symbol of the Confederacy

Most of the European settlers who lived in what had been East Florida were a thrawn lot of mixed ancestries. Isolated and independent, self-reliant but communal, they greeted American suzerainty of Florida with a shrug. Most of them made their livings fishing from the shores of their tiny settlements, and civilization seemed very far away.  Only a few very tough souls lived south of Lake Okeechobee, hugging the coast. To their backs were the impenetrable Everglades, the “River of Grass,” populated only by Euro-American hermits, escaped African-American slaves, and by Native American tribes. The Native Americans were known as the Seminole, and were an amalgam of local tribes and other peoples who had fled ever further southward to escape being slaughtered by whites. 

 

An historic house in Key West, not far from where Juan Trippe founded Pan Am

Further to the south, across a broad stretch of water, lay Bone Island, Cayo Hueso, soon to be known as Key West. Key Westers were the most singular of all of Florida’s residents. Called “Conchs,” the population of Key West (and all the Keys) was a happy admixture of Spaniards, Indians, Americans, African-Americans and assorted human odds and ends who had found their way to the isolated island where they prospered, trading with all and sundry in the Caribbean Basin. When Florida left the Union in 1861, the Conchs left Florida and seceded back into the United States, more for contrariness’ sake than anything else. They ran guns and goods to the blockaded Confederacy and supported the Union garrison in the Keys with equal fervor. 

 

Rampant development has done away with much of South Florida's history. The oldest house in the entire region still standing on its original foundations is Coconut Grove's The Barnacle. It dates from a relatively new 1877

The first permanent settlement between Lake Okeechobee and Key West was the little town of Cocoanut Grove, founded in 1823 when the Cape Florida lighthouse first went into operation. Residents of The Grove had much in common with the Conchs, being a collection of Euro-Americans, free blacks, Bahamians and other Caribs, and a handful of Hispanics. Less than two years later, Fort Dallas was founded on the banks of the Miami River. Established to protect white settlers from Seminole attacks, Fort Dallas played a large part in the First Seminole War. 

Unfortunately, as Florida became increasingly “civilized,” mixed communities such as Key West and Coconut Grove (the spelling adopted in 1919) became increasingly segregated. This process only accelerated as Henry M. Flagler’s train line snaked southward. In 1896, the town of Fort Dallas, the land mostly owned by a woman named Julia Tuttle, changed its name to Miami. In 1925, Miami absorbed Coconut Grove.  

The barracks of Fort Dallas (1835) stand in Lummis Park today, fairly far from their original site on the Miami River

     

Miami’s growth was spurred by the Florida Land Boom of the early 1920s, which in turn had been spurred by Flagler’s earlier activities.  Just after the war, enterprising small businessmen bought up and resold much of south Florida’s available empty land to northern investors. Everybody in this first wave of land speculation became rich. The tropical climate of south Florida attracted vacationers and retirees and entrepeneurs (just as it still does), and a line of beach communities (Boca Raton, Delray Beach and Boynton Beach among them) were founded. Miami became the site of several luxury hotels. Hotels also began to rise in Miami Beach under the eye of Carl Fisher and John Collins and others. 

 

Sundy House, in Delray Beach, Florida, is typical of the kinds of homes built in the area during the early Florida Land Boom

The second phase of the Florida land boom was a disaster. Most of the good land had been bought up by large investors in the first wave. The second wave was propagated by fly-by-nights who sold land, “site unseen” to small Northern investors. Most of the land they sold was useless Everglades territory (with more modern technology, vast areas of the ‘Glades were later turned into the bedroom communities in the 1970s and 1980s). The boom went bust, and Florida slipped into a serious recession. A string of hurricanes in the late 1920s and early 1930s did not help. The Great Depression set Florida back for decades. 

It was around 1928 that Juan Trippe decided to move Pan American’s operations to the mainland from Key West. The Lake Okeechobee Hurricane had convinced Trippe that the Keys were too remote and too vulnerable to make a good permanent home for Pan Am. He began to look around for other digs. 

An S-38 (right) and an S-40 (left) prepare to lift off at Dinner Key. The houseboat terminal looms over the scene. Note all the spectators on the observation decks of the houseboat

The size of the houseboat was impressive. It is not always easy, at a quick glance, to tell this temporary terminal (1931 - 1934) from the permanent one (1934 -1946)

In 1929, his eye lighted on the seaplane base at Dinner Key. Prior to World War I, Dinner Key had been a small island just off the coast of Coconut Grove, separated from Florida’s mainland by a slit channel. The island had long been a popular destination for daysailers who would anchor in its lee and picnic, thus giving the island its name. 

In 1917, the Navy had purchased Dinner Key, filled in the slit channel, connected the island to the mainland, laid runways, put up hangars, and built a seaplane training base there. It had a brief life. Abandoned after the end of the war, Dinner Key was used by local fliers as a convenient landing strip. The picnickers returned, the sails glowed red in the sunrise and sunset, and the buildings on the site began to crumble. With the end of the Florida Land Boom, the field got less and less use. By the time Juan Trippe found Dinner Key, it needed a complete refurbishing. 

Trippe added more landfill, upgraded the runways, and began building an impressively Art Deco terminal / headquarters building for Pan American. Trippe, who’d bought the land from the Navy, handed some of it back (at a profit) for the Navy to establish Dinner Key Naval Air Station which provided the logistical support Pan Am needed to use the site. And while Trippe’s new airport came into existence, Miami Beach was building its own famed Art Deco district.

 

Busy Dinner Key

Pan Am's hangars at Dinner Key are still used by the Dinner Key Marina's various yacht clubs

Trippe grandiosely named his new creation International Pan American Airport to distinguish it from Pan American Field, the airport for landplanes he was building west of Miami (now Miami International Airport).  Most people just called it “Dinner Key.”  Local residents became familiar with the flight schedule and flocked to watch the big planes take off and land in Biscayne Bay. Many brought picnic baskets. 

Dinner Key was strictly a flying boat airport. The first Pan Am terminal building was a huge houseboat that Juan Trippe had found in Cuba and had towed across the Florida Straits. Permanently anchored at Dinner Key, and with two huge floating docks appended to each side as loading platforms, this makeshift terminal operated from 1931 to 1934 when the main terminal building was fully completed. 

By the time the new terminal building opened, International Pan American Airport was the busiest airport in the world. Pan Am was serving 33 countries by 1934.  

 

Dinner Key was the busiest airport in the world in the mid-1930s. A lot of the Sunday drivers were sightseers, hoping to watch the Flying Clippers take to the air

An S-42 at anchor in Biscayne Bay

An S-42 preparing for liftoff. The men in the old-style bathing suits are Pan Am "ground" crew for the flying boat

The lobby of the new building was vast, decorated with Art Deco-style lighting and murals throughout.  The ticket desk featured flight specials. The clearance desk was used for pre-boarding. Two spring-loaded scales weighed passenger luggage. The Arrival and Departure boards were off to one side. 

But what stood out was the globe. Juan Trippe had a fetish about globes, and the bigger the better. He loved to study maps and measure distances across the Earth’s surface (using pins and string). The globe at Dinner Key was a fantasy come true for him.

The globe in the Dinner Key terminal was massive, and it rotated ceaselessly. As many people wandered into the terminal to view the globe as came in to fly. It became a Miami landmark. And it remains one, at the Miami Science Museum, although the original, badly dated political map that graced the sphere has since been replaced with a topographical map.

The popularity of the globe required some response. A plaque that went up at Dinner Key described the globe:

The Art Deco terminal that opened in 1934. The Globe is very evident. Note the National Recovery Act sign behind the counter

The globe today. After massive political changes following World War II, it was decided to make it a topographic globe. The globe is still impressive, but not as arresting to the eye as it once was

From Pan American Airways:

"THIS GLOBE OF THE EARTH

is steel: weight 3 1/4 tons:

diameter 10 feet: circumference 31 feet, 5 inches.

Shows airlines of the world, in addition to chief geographical features, including ocean depths.

The globe is oriented so that its axis parallels the axis of the earth underfoot, its North Pole pointing to the North Star.

On this scale (1 inch to 64 miles) the greatest ocean depth, 34,218 feet just east of the Philippines - would be on 1/10 of an inch below the surface of this ball, showing that, compared with the bulk of the earth, the great oceans are relatively only a thin covering of water.

The deepest man has gone beneath the surface of the earth (William Beebe, who descended 2,200 feet into the ocean at Bermuda) would on this scale be scarcely through the paint - 1/150th of an inch down.

The highest man has ascended off the earth (Captain Albert W. Stevens, 14 miles) would be but 1/4 of an inch off the surface of this globe.

The world's highest mountain (Mt. Everest in the Himalayas, 29,141 feet) would project less than 1/10 of an inch from this globe's surface.

All the people in the world, packed into a box, could on this scale be contained in a case less than 1/100 of an inch each way in size."

A busy day at Dinner Key

 

World War II interrupted operations at Dinner Key in 1943, when the Navy appropriated the entire site for military use. Pan Am moved its management operations offsite to Pan American Field. The occasional clipper still flew from Dinner Key, but now on government business. The last commercial flight from Dinner Key took place on August 9, 1945. The facility was shut in 1946. 

A Boeing 314 taking flight

The City of Miami bought the building from Pan American in 1954, and it became Miami City Hall. At first greatly modified for civil use, Miami has more recently restored the building to its original Art Deco condition.    

Dinner Key today. The new --- now 80 year old ---  terminal building stands at the top of the traffic circle. The boat basin covers most of Pan Am's old "airfield"